Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin Chapter 019 - OpenStack Cinder Block Device Service

Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin relate the experience of converting a small VMware cluster into two small OpenStack clusters, and the adventures and friends I made along the way.

Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin Chapter 019 - OpenStack Cinder Block Device Service

My primary reference for installing Cinder is here:

https://docs.openstack.org/cinder/yoga/install/

I ran into some notes online that I should expect to run into problems requiring "lvm_suppress_fd_warnings = False" yet I did not run into any problems like that, a false alarm.  Might have been a problem fixed long ago in an older release of OpenStack.

The /var/log/cinder/cinder-volume.log file was filling up with volume name errors so as per:

https://docs.openstack.org/cinder/yoga/admin/ts-cinder-config.html

I ended up configuring my /etc/tgt/targets.conf to look like this:

include /etc/tgt/conf.d/cinder.conf

default-driver iscsi

That seemed to fix the problem some months ago; I declined to enter a bug report at that time, and I don't remember why (sorry).

I was getting some interesting error messages in the cinder log along the lines of cinder is trying to run lsscsi and nvme-cli as part of its processes, and the docs do not specify installing those packages so they are not installed, which results in some error messages in the logs, so I installed those packages and no more errors appear in the logs.  I began the process to file a bug, and found one already exists from about one year ago:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/kolla/+bug/1942038

It's becoming a common theme in this blogpost series, that reading bug reports needs to be part of the OpenStack installation process, because most mistakes and problems are long ago documented with fixes and workarounds.

If you follow the instructions at this URL:

https://docs.openstack.org/cinder/yoga/install/cinder-storage-install-ubuntu.html

You will be instructed toward the end to "service tgt restart" but depending on what workload you've applied to tgt in the process of experimenting and testing, you MAY need to "service tgt forcedrestart".  I could not justify filing a bug on this because it depends on what the admin has done historically, and its pretty obvious how to work around the problem if you encounter it.

This next Cinder situation is out of order, but it does not seem you can configure the OS region for a Cinder install in cinder.conf, and the default template for Nova comes up with the wrong default os_region_name (NOTE its case sensitive) for Cinder.  You'll be fixing that later in the nova.conf when you set up Nova.  This is a Nova problem that is Cinder-adjacent so I mention it in the Cinder notes.  You can get led down a false path if Nova reports it cannot talk to Cinder, but Cinder seems fine, and its all because Nova has the wrong os_region_name in the default template.  Although its not really bug-worthy for Nova in that you shouldn't be relying on the template to configure your Region Name anyway.

Anyway, tomorrow is Neutron day.

Stay tuned for the next chapter!